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Fanworks fandom is for many women(*) a way to create a space where we can express ourselves freely and escape the oppressive sexist heteronormativity of mainstream fiction. (If that's not how it works for you, you may not get much out of this post)
There is to some extent a division between those who find their joy through m/m, and those through female protagonists. These aren't neat divisions and there's people who do neither or both (I've written male protagonist m/m, m/m/f and gen myself) but to some extent they're mutually exclusive approaches.
Sadly, the women of both groups are inclined to get into "All het is heteronormative and sexist" vs "All m/m is mysogynist and sexist" arguments, which, beyond ignoring femslash, as Hoo boy, thoughts on yaoi (let me tell you them) points out isn't helpful or accurate. That is definitely not what I'm trying to get into here.
What I'd like to express, because it's been niggling at me ever since I first encountered m/m fanfic nearly a decade ago, is the way that while m/m slash fandom clearly acts as a feminist self expression thing for it's fans, and I realise it isn't actually just an extension of the Patriarchy and it's hatred of female characters, that is how it feels to me a lot of the time. And I'm not sure what if anything can be done about it (mainly I just needed to get this out of my head).
My brain's a bit mushy today, I apologise in advance for any giant holes in my argument, feel free to poke at them though I may take a while to reply.
Also: I am not accusing m/m slashers generally of sexist intent. I mean I think some of them are being sexist, but they're no worse than anyone else on the whole imo and my m/m slashy friends are all awesome feministy people. This is about the effect of m/m fandom on me as someone outside it.
So: I tend to identify with female characters in fiction. Attacks on them often feel like attacks on me. I realise that fictional people are not the same as real people, and that a bunch of women writing about men is not equivalent to able bodied people never writing disabled characters etc, but that's what it feels like from my POV and no amount of intellectual appreciation of those women's reasons seems able to change that.
If there are no major female characters in a work, or none I can remotely identify with (and this doesn't require them to be similar to me, eg my deep love of violent morally ambiguous bad girls which is…not me :D) then I can still enjoy the story but a part of me will feel unfulfilled and excluded, and if the female characters get treated like crap it feels like a sexist attack. And I feel that way a lot, because female characters tend to get short shrift in most mainstream fiction.
If the fans of a genre I'm reading put down the female characters or don't even remember they exist this makes me feel excluded and attacked again. Since I'm a scifi geek I've had a lot of this in mainstream fandom as well.
And for me, m/m fic and fandom often feels like more of the same. More stories about male protagonists, more putting down of female characters and not seeing them as worth concentrating on or caring about. It's not as heteronormative, and has other nice touches which appeal to my geek girl heart (EDIT: And often treats it's female characters quite well, even if they're not the romantic leads), but it's still about men, and I get enough of that everywhere else.
(Het writers can be pretty bad too, with the "all the female characters except the one I like are evil harpy whores I want to stab in the face" thing. But at least they like one of them)
Now the fic itself I can simply not read, and there's generally enough het and to a lesser extent female centred gen and femslash etc that I can only read m/m when the story looks particularly appealing or I'm in the mood. And for fandoms where slash is rare I like seeing more of it, since m/m relationships are as valid as any other and it feels skeevy to ignore them (especially if they're canon!).
But for example it was like a kick to the gut when I looked at the femslash tag for Supernatural on delicious in the vain hopes of finding some stories about the female characters and it was mostly girl!Sam/girl!Dean. And I totally understand why people would do that: the female characters in Supernatural are all WAY more shallowly written than Sam and Dean. For me, that's an impetus to write them better or draw them etc, for others that's an impetus not to write them at all (the third option is to add fleshed out female characters from other shows. Faith works very well ^_^) You could say "Then why read SPN fic?" but you might also ask…why be in scifi fandom? Why consume mainstream fiction? Sometimes the types of stories I'm interested in come with a hefty dose of sexism, and fanworks are how I try and deal with that, and it makes me sad sometimes that most fanworks aren't 100% helpful in that regard.
Beyond the fanworks there's the meta.
For a start there's all the female character bashing, the "I would write female characters if they weren't all boring and stupid and girly" argument. And on the one hand people can't help not liking those characters, and they generally have a point about them being less well written and full of sexist cliche, but on the other as someone who doesn't feel able to just switch to using the male characters as avatars if people go beyond "I have trouble identifying with these characters" to "pretty much all female characters suck objectively" it again feels like an attack, yet more "girls and girliness sucks".
There's also the meta that isn't about slash at all but still sets it up as the default. To give an random example I encountered this morning: on the whole I found the post The Riches of Embarrassment: Or, Why I Don't Have a Humiliation Squick really interesting but I was struck by the line In fandom at large, I'd say that 90% ... are about people being humiliated specifically for wanting sex - which is slut-shaming, and gay-shaming, and the rest of the paragraph makes it pretty clear that for her "fandom"="m/m fandom", even though afaict her argument would make just as much sense for other types of fic.
It's not a big deal in that individual post (especially since I'm not into humiliation stuff anyway so don't feel unfairly excluded) but it's everywhere. And since my brain pings slash fandom as to some extent part of the Patriarchy it can feel pretty oppressive, the equivalent "Go away, you and your girliness isn't welcome, you are Doing fandom Wrong" feeling that I get from all that sf meta that assumes geek=male geek. And it feels particularly unpleasant when I encounter sentiments that all fanfic outside of m/m is boring and sexist and blech, because it's basically saying "Your escape from sexism is sexist, and the only way to be feminist is to stop caring about women" (of course I'm sure m/m fans feel the same way about a lot of anti-slash meta, and I hope this post isn't having that effect on you). See for example the various links and examples on this post and it's comments.
EDIT: It's been pointed out that I'm conflating things that are true of ALL m/m and m/m fans with stuff that's just a general unfortunate trend. This is Very Unfair, and I apologise. So, to summarise my issues:
Things which are not inherently sexist but still sometimes make me uncomfortable, even though I understand intellectually why people do them: Writing lots of stories whose protagonists are male and which focus on the emotional journeys of the male characters. Explaining why you are not drawn to write female characters.
Things which are common but not universal in m/m fandom that are kind of sexist: Saying that All Female Characters Suck. Writing stories which totally ignore or put down the female characters of canon. Ignoring or belittling any fanfic which is not m/m.
Are there other equivalent issues beyond m/m? Hell yes. I'm pretty sure that if I was a lesbian or trans or poly or otherwise queer but still focussed on female protagonists then I'd find het just as oppressive as m/m and be annoyed that those were assumed to be my only two choices. Even as a straight cis woman femslasher who writes a lot of gen it grates.
And of course then there's the glaring absence and poor representations of characters who are non-white/POC, disabled, fat, non-Western etc.
What should people do about it? Well, they could stand to stop putting female characters down so much (that goes for most of fandom, really, but m/m writers are more likely to talk about how ALL female characters suck) It is possible to say "I did not identify with this character" or "Aspects of how this character was created and written are sexist and off putting" etc without saying "this character sucks and is crap and unlikeable". Which is not to say female characters are never sucky and hard to like, but when considering how to express such sentiments consider the effect of your words on women who identify with that character.
And obviously remembering the existence of f/f and m/f and gen and polyfic and fic that doesn't fit into any of those boxes, and seeing them as just as valid and relevant as m/m and only excluding them from your meta when it's necessary to do so would be much more inclusive, and shouldn't harsh anyone's squee.
I'm definitely not saying people shouldn't write m/m. Hell, I've written it, it's a valid creative genre and from all accounts one many peoples find freeing, and I'm not going to try to take that away from them. I like a lot of Very Heteronormative Romances and I can understand how many people (especially queer ones!) find them oppressive. Sometimes the things we need to be happy make other people unhappy, and there's no easy solution.
I do think all creators should stretch themselves and think about the voices they're not representing, but what that means for any given creator will vary.
Sidenote: despite being mostly a fanartist and constantly annoyed at the way fanart gets ignored in meta, here I am doing it myself by pretty much only talking about fic. But this doesn't feel like oppression in the same way, it's just irritating :)
Relevant to this topic: discussion and links to a brand new Bechdel-passing slash comm.
(*)There are plenty of people in fanfic fandom who don't identify as female, but the dynamics there are more complicated and tend not to have sweeping generalisations made about them that I feel the need to poke at. (Apart from being excluded by sweeping generalisations about all fanfic writers being female of course :))
There is to some extent a division between those who find their joy through m/m, and those through female protagonists. These aren't neat divisions and there's people who do neither or both (I've written male protagonist m/m, m/m/f and gen myself) but to some extent they're mutually exclusive approaches.
Sadly, the women of both groups are inclined to get into "All het is heteronormative and sexist" vs "All m/m is mysogynist and sexist" arguments, which, beyond ignoring femslash, as Hoo boy, thoughts on yaoi (let me tell you them) points out isn't helpful or accurate. That is definitely not what I'm trying to get into here.
What I'd like to express, because it's been niggling at me ever since I first encountered m/m fanfic nearly a decade ago, is the way that while m/m slash fandom clearly acts as a feminist self expression thing for it's fans, and I realise it isn't actually just an extension of the Patriarchy and it's hatred of female characters, that is how it feels to me a lot of the time. And I'm not sure what if anything can be done about it (mainly I just needed to get this out of my head).
My brain's a bit mushy today, I apologise in advance for any giant holes in my argument, feel free to poke at them though I may take a while to reply.
Also: I am not accusing m/m slashers generally of sexist intent. I mean I think some of them are being sexist, but they're no worse than anyone else on the whole imo and my m/m slashy friends are all awesome feministy people. This is about the effect of m/m fandom on me as someone outside it.
So: I tend to identify with female characters in fiction. Attacks on them often feel like attacks on me. I realise that fictional people are not the same as real people, and that a bunch of women writing about men is not equivalent to able bodied people never writing disabled characters etc, but that's what it feels like from my POV and no amount of intellectual appreciation of those women's reasons seems able to change that.
If there are no major female characters in a work, or none I can remotely identify with (and this doesn't require them to be similar to me, eg my deep love of violent morally ambiguous bad girls which is…not me :D) then I can still enjoy the story but a part of me will feel unfulfilled and excluded, and if the female characters get treated like crap it feels like a sexist attack. And I feel that way a lot, because female characters tend to get short shrift in most mainstream fiction.
If the fans of a genre I'm reading put down the female characters or don't even remember they exist this makes me feel excluded and attacked again. Since I'm a scifi geek I've had a lot of this in mainstream fandom as well.
And for me, m/m fic and fandom often feels like more of the same. More stories about male protagonists, more putting down of female characters and not seeing them as worth concentrating on or caring about. It's not as heteronormative, and has other nice touches which appeal to my geek girl heart (EDIT: And often treats it's female characters quite well, even if they're not the romantic leads), but it's still about men, and I get enough of that everywhere else.
(Het writers can be pretty bad too, with the "all the female characters except the one I like are evil harpy whores I want to stab in the face" thing. But at least they like one of them)
Now the fic itself I can simply not read, and there's generally enough het and to a lesser extent female centred gen and femslash etc that I can only read m/m when the story looks particularly appealing or I'm in the mood. And for fandoms where slash is rare I like seeing more of it, since m/m relationships are as valid as any other and it feels skeevy to ignore them (especially if they're canon!).
But for example it was like a kick to the gut when I looked at the femslash tag for Supernatural on delicious in the vain hopes of finding some stories about the female characters and it was mostly girl!Sam/girl!Dean. And I totally understand why people would do that: the female characters in Supernatural are all WAY more shallowly written than Sam and Dean. For me, that's an impetus to write them better or draw them etc, for others that's an impetus not to write them at all (the third option is to add fleshed out female characters from other shows. Faith works very well ^_^) You could say "Then why read SPN fic?" but you might also ask…why be in scifi fandom? Why consume mainstream fiction? Sometimes the types of stories I'm interested in come with a hefty dose of sexism, and fanworks are how I try and deal with that, and it makes me sad sometimes that most fanworks aren't 100% helpful in that regard.
Beyond the fanworks there's the meta.
For a start there's all the female character bashing, the "I would write female characters if they weren't all boring and stupid and girly" argument. And on the one hand people can't help not liking those characters, and they generally have a point about them being less well written and full of sexist cliche, but on the other as someone who doesn't feel able to just switch to using the male characters as avatars if people go beyond "I have trouble identifying with these characters" to "pretty much all female characters suck objectively" it again feels like an attack, yet more "girls and girliness sucks".
There's also the meta that isn't about slash at all but still sets it up as the default. To give an random example I encountered this morning: on the whole I found the post The Riches of Embarrassment: Or, Why I Don't Have a Humiliation Squick really interesting but I was struck by the line In fandom at large, I'd say that 90% ... are about people being humiliated specifically for wanting sex - which is slut-shaming, and gay-shaming, and the rest of the paragraph makes it pretty clear that for her "fandom"="m/m fandom", even though afaict her argument would make just as much sense for other types of fic.
It's not a big deal in that individual post (especially since I'm not into humiliation stuff anyway so don't feel unfairly excluded) but it's everywhere. And since my brain pings slash fandom as to some extent part of the Patriarchy it can feel pretty oppressive, the equivalent "Go away, you and your girliness isn't welcome, you are Doing fandom Wrong" feeling that I get from all that sf meta that assumes geek=male geek. And it feels particularly unpleasant when I encounter sentiments that all fanfic outside of m/m is boring and sexist and blech, because it's basically saying "Your escape from sexism is sexist, and the only way to be feminist is to stop caring about women" (of course I'm sure m/m fans feel the same way about a lot of anti-slash meta, and I hope this post isn't having that effect on you). See for example the various links and examples on this post and it's comments.
EDIT: It's been pointed out that I'm conflating things that are true of ALL m/m and m/m fans with stuff that's just a general unfortunate trend. This is Very Unfair, and I apologise. So, to summarise my issues:
Things which are not inherently sexist but still sometimes make me uncomfortable, even though I understand intellectually why people do them: Writing lots of stories whose protagonists are male and which focus on the emotional journeys of the male characters. Explaining why you are not drawn to write female characters.
Things which are common but not universal in m/m fandom that are kind of sexist: Saying that All Female Characters Suck. Writing stories which totally ignore or put down the female characters of canon. Ignoring or belittling any fanfic which is not m/m.
Are there other equivalent issues beyond m/m? Hell yes. I'm pretty sure that if I was a lesbian or trans or poly or otherwise queer but still focussed on female protagonists then I'd find het just as oppressive as m/m and be annoyed that those were assumed to be my only two choices. Even as a straight cis woman femslasher who writes a lot of gen it grates.
And of course then there's the glaring absence and poor representations of characters who are non-white/POC, disabled, fat, non-Western etc.
What should people do about it? Well, they could stand to stop putting female characters down so much (that goes for most of fandom, really, but m/m writers are more likely to talk about how ALL female characters suck) It is possible to say "I did not identify with this character" or "Aspects of how this character was created and written are sexist and off putting" etc without saying "this character sucks and is crap and unlikeable". Which is not to say female characters are never sucky and hard to like, but when considering how to express such sentiments consider the effect of your words on women who identify with that character.
And obviously remembering the existence of f/f and m/f and gen and polyfic and fic that doesn't fit into any of those boxes, and seeing them as just as valid and relevant as m/m and only excluding them from your meta when it's necessary to do so would be much more inclusive, and shouldn't harsh anyone's squee.
I'm definitely not saying people shouldn't write m/m. Hell, I've written it, it's a valid creative genre and from all accounts one many peoples find freeing, and I'm not going to try to take that away from them. I like a lot of Very Heteronormative Romances and I can understand how many people (especially queer ones!) find them oppressive. Sometimes the things we need to be happy make other people unhappy, and there's no easy solution.
I do think all creators should stretch themselves and think about the voices they're not representing, but what that means for any given creator will vary.
Sidenote: despite being mostly a fanartist and constantly annoyed at the way fanart gets ignored in meta, here I am doing it myself by pretty much only talking about fic. But this doesn't feel like oppression in the same way, it's just irritating :)
Relevant to this topic: discussion and links to a brand new Bechdel-passing slash comm.
(*)There are plenty of people in fanfic fandom who don't identify as female, but the dynamics there are more complicated and tend not to have sweeping generalisations made about them that I feel the need to poke at. (Apart from being excluded by sweeping generalisations about all fanfic writers being female of course :))
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THIS. THIS.